Friday, June 24, 2005

Sen. Durbin Should Have Waited A Few Days...

GENEVA (AFP) - Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.

Unfortunately, the US didn't actually come clean, according to this article:

"They said it was a question of isolated cases, that there was nothing systematic and that the guilty were in the process of being punished."

The US report said that those involved were low-ranking members of the military and that their acts were not approved by their superiors, the member added.

In other words, the Administration is willing to admit a soldier inadvertently pissed on a detainee, and some other soldier inadvertently mishandled a Koran, but there's nothing else to see here, folks. Fortunately, the UN feels differently:

Four UN human rights experts on Thursday slammed the United States for stalling on a request to allow visits to terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, and said they planned to carry out an indirect probe of conditions there.